Over the past 9 months, I have been investigating how the Home Office has been preparing for the national grooming gangs inquiry - and crucially, whether vital evidence has been properly protected. What I’ve found is extremely concerning... In June last year, Baroness Louise Casey recommended a full national inquiry. Her Audit was clear that in the meantime, police forces, councils and authorities across the country should be required not to destroy any records that could be used as evidence. But we now know that didn’t happen. Freedom of Information requests now appear to show the Home Office waited a staggering 212 days - nearly seven months - before formally contacting police forces and other key agencies. Today, the Home Affairs select Committee has written directly to the Home Secretary warning that this 212 failure means that some records critical to the inquiry “might have been destroyed”. That is a staggering failure at the heart of government. I first raised the alarm on this in December, after uncovering that authorities in Bradford had not received any instruction at all from government. Just two days later, newly appointed Chair of the National Inquiry, Baroness Anne Longfield, wrote to the Government reinforcing exactly the same point. Yet even after that warning, it still took another 36 days for the Home Office to act and pass the Chair's message on to authorities. Freedom of information requests show that then-Permanent Secretary Antonio Romeo finally wrote to Home Office-funded Arm’s Length Bodies and Chief Constables across the country on 14 January 2026 - 7 months after the Casey Audit. The government now has serious and unavoidable questions it must answer. - Why was there such a delay? - What kind of records may have been lost? - What are the legal consequences if records have been lost, but the Home Office failed to act? Even now, it remains unclear whether local councils across the country were ever formally contacted at all about the protection of records. Unless the government can provide clear answers to these questions, they risk not only undermining confidence in this process, but failing victims who have already been let down for far too long. Read the Home Affairs Select Committee letter here: committees.parliament.uk/publications/5…
